New Mac Mini Announced! [MERGED]

[Bitmap Frog]

yep. last component needed for it to be an all-in-one media device. i realize steve wants to stream/buy from itunes, but the realities of downloading and streaming 1080p full movies is many years away. blu ray drive in the mean time just makes sense. common!

Apple serving its customers with what they want?

Are you crazy?

We are here to overpay for what Jobs thinks we need.

And the new pricing is highway robbery, they prolly were only making a 10% on the older machine and decided it was time to bring it up with the company average of 20%+. They did that with the Mac Pro last revision.

 

[Blu-Ray]

It's better quality than iTunes.
It's often cheaper than iTunes.
It's quicker to go to a store and buy a BR, than wait for iTunes to download semi-HD.
You can watch it on any number of hundreds of models of PC Laptops with BR drives.
And your PS3.
And take it round to a friends house and watch it there.
And watch the extras, and subtitles, and directors commentary.
And lend it to a colleague for a weekend.
And your ISP will not cut you off for buying 10 of them in a month.

Infact, your statement is so wrong, it's ironic. There's nothing good about movies on the iTunes store. I see no redeeming quality about buying TV or Movies on iTunes at all. More DRM infested than anything else out there, poor quality, high priced. Where's the up side? I don't see a damn thing. Who's actually been hoodwinked here?

And if another person says 'Oh - but in the future it'll all be downloads'

That's great. In the future all our cars will be flying. We should close all the gas stations and demolish the freeways now, right? Because in the future, our cars will fly so we don't need them.

Pure blinkered idiocy - nothing else.

Here's a crazy idea... how about Jobs stops lying about the 'world of hurt', and gives his customers A DAMN CHOICE.

Put $100 on the price tag for a BR drive - and I'll buy it.

I'll never spend $100 on iTunes movies. Ever.

My thoughts too. The only thing holding me back from switching from PC to Apple is the availability of BR. I have a good BR library now and just can't convince myself to buy a new machine without it.

 

[JID]

Ssd

If it came with an SSD at this same price then I'd buy one right now.

 

[Cheffy Dave]

Looks nice, but £650!

I rather think Apple have forgotten what the Mac Mini was all about - a cheap Mac to hook new owners. My Parents in Law bought one a few weeks ago. £500 was pushing it, but £650 and they would have got another PC instead.

I can see the AppleTV/Mac Mini merge idea, but Apple really now need a new £400 Mac Micro.

Yeah? well guess what, this redesign will be flying off the shelves!Very

 

[Anuba]

You also forget to mention import tax,plus there are also other things which make it absurdly more expensive than in the states.

Look... it's not about the usual discrepancy between EU/US pricing. We know about that and we know why. This is about a 15-20% price hike introduced with the new Mac Mini.

Here's a comparison between Mac prices in USD and SEK (the latter obtained by excluding VAT then converting to USD at the current exchange rate):

iMac: $1199 / $1168 (-2.5%)
Mac Pro: $2499 / $2540 (+1.7%)
Old Mac Mini: $599 / $609 (+1.7%)
MacBook Air: $1499 / $1524 (+1.7%)
MacBook Pro: $1199 / $1219 (+1.7%)
MacBook: $999 / $1036 (+3.7%)

Those miniscule differences are nothing to complain about, but...

New Mac Mini: $699 / $812 (+16.3%)

Huh? From negligible differences to 16 f***** percent?

So...
New Mac Pro: $2499 +16% = $2900? Forget it. Unsellable, unless made of solid gold.

A 16% hike is a massive departure from anything that happened before, and would only be warranted if our local currency (SEK) had fallen against the dollar at an unprecedented speed. It has not, in fact the USD is worth less now than it was when some of the prices I listed at the top were set. This price was literally pulled out of a hat by someone on crack, meth and shock therapy.

 

[siliconcowboy]

Sorry but the above maths is wrong.

UK Price £649 less the VAT comes out at £552.34
£552.34 converts to $814.35 before tax
US price $699 before tax

That gives a difference of $115.35 which is roughly 17% difference. Now we normally pay about 7% extra in the UK as the additional cost of doing business here but the extra 10% is extracting the urine somewhat. Shame because it's a lovely machine and I was in the market for a Mini but no way at that price. Even with my education discount it's far far too expensive.

The server on the other hand is a really really nice bit of kit for the money.

They are just preparing for the inevitable anti-trust fines that they'll face in the UK over iAds and the App Store An extra $100 here or there should put them right where they want to be after fines. It's fairly safe to say nothing will happen here in the US.

 

[JamonBull]

My thoughts too. The only thing holding me back from switching from PC to Apple is the availability of BR. I have a good BR library now and just can't convince myself to buy a new machine without it.

Your name made me lol...

 

[Gatteau]

Let me see, first Mac ever to have a straight HDMI output?

 

[archipellago]

The mini is so expensive because Apple only wants the desperate to buy it. Its a non market for them, I bet they barely sell a million of them per year, worldwide.

nickel and dime the idiots? sure why not?

the sensible world will stay well away.

 

[LillDrutten]

SD card can some one please explain. What a joke. Express port had been a big hit but SD card? Did they buy a surplus stock cheep or something?

 

[Anuba]

I live in a small town(5000) in the Netherlands and we already have 50Mbits optical fibreglass connection and soon 100Mb

Yeah yeah yeah, and I live in Sweden. We've had 3G since the spring of 2004, we were first in the world to introduce 4G in December 2009. The government rolled out fiber across the entire country in 1999-2000. 40% of the households have 100 Mbit fiber (if they want) and everyone can get 24 Mbit DSL. Myself I have 100 Mbit cable. Before that I had 100 Mbit fiber from 2005-2009. But you know what? Most people don't give a crap about having the fastest, latest cutting edge tech or connectivity. Many stay on connections like 2 Mbit DSL. Many stick with pre-3G phones and have zero desire for 4G. The 5% of the population who are tech geeks are a small minority.

You're making the same mistake as everyone else who ever tried to predict the future: Assuming that everyone is dying to jump on the latest tech immediately. Like 1950's sci-fi movies where they thought that everyone would be wearing silver uniforms, speeding around in flying cars and eating weird compressed bricks of nutrients instead of regular food. Yet here we are 60 years later and the bicycle is still going strong. So is the land telephone, the manual wheelchair and the nicely cooked meal.

A lot of people don't want to use their internet connection for watching movies even though they can. They will still be buying movies on Blu-ray even when they have gigabit internet.

 

[LillDrutten]

Look... it's not about the usual discrepancy between EU/US pricing. We know about that and we know why. This is about a 15-20% price hike introduced with the new Mac Mini.

Here's a comparison between Mac prices in USD and SEK (the latter obtained by excluding VAT then converting to USD at the current exchange rate):

iMac: $1199 / $1168 (-2.5%)
Mac Pro: $2499 / $2540 (+1.7%)
Old Mac Mini: $599 / $609 (+1.7%)
MacBook Air: $1499 / $1524 (+1.7%)
MacBook Pro: $1199 / $1219 (+1.7%)
MacBook: $999 / $1036 (+3.7%)

Those miniscule differences are nothing to complain about, but...

New Mac Mini: $699 / $812 (+16.3%)

Huh? From negligible differences to 16 f***** percent?

So...
New Mac Pro: $2499 +16% = $2900? Forget it. Unsellable, unless made of solid gold.

A 16% hike is a massive departure from anything that happened before, and would only be warranted if our local currency (SEK) had fallen against the dollar at an unprecedented speed. It has not, in fact the USD is worth less now than it was when some of the prices I listed at the top were set. This price was literally pulled out of a hat by someone on crack, meth and shock therapy.

Thats why there market share is so small in sweden.

 

[dave61]

No IR for HTPC

Yes there is, it is at the rightmost end of the ODD slot, just like on the current model. Look closely at the pictures and consider that the IR remote is an configuration option.

 

[motulist]

Just wondering, why was the fastest computer of its size matter? For $700, I want a more beefier macintosh. Why do people care about its size. Its a desktop, and its going to sit n one place anyways. Notebooks are for mobility, and desktops stay where they are. If your anything like the people I know, they have a computer cabinet, and it has a place for the tower. Sure smaller is nice, but because its not going anywhere, if you only have to make it a little larger to fix more robust modern components inside, why not?

Agree whole-heartedly. The old Mac Mini's was already a great small size. All they should've done is revamped the styling to make it look fresh, while keeping it the same size, and upgrading the internal hardware, all while keeping it the same price.

There's absolutely NO point in making an already-tiny desktop machine even tinier.

There's absolutely NO point in a desktop machine having a strong-but-expensive unibody case.

 

[dave61]

I live in a small town(5000) in the Netherlands and we already have 50Mbits optical fibreglass connection and soon 100Mb.
The Netherlands will be like Japan and S. Korea in no time.
Also Europe is on the verge of getting high speed internet everywhere,Neelie Smit Kroes is a European congress member and she wants Europe to have fast internet everywhere in a few years

Lucky you. I live in a small town in the Netherlands, in the Randstad; I pay my thieving ISP for 16mb and get 5mb if I am lucky. Neelie Smit Kroes can want for many things fast internet in the whole of Europe is going to take a very long time.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

It'd be nice if they would have made it large enough to hold two hard drives or at least offer the two drive model as a consumer option (I don't use my DVD drives much as it is and I could use the "share" mode for when I need it). The HDMI port means they SHOULD offer AppleTV software (ala Front Row) to optionally run on top of it. I'd MUCH rather have this as my primary interface for my big home theater room and use the old one for another (lesser) room since this thing could obviously handle 1080p, XBMC (and other players out of the box), etc. I don't think the $100 increase was warranted given how out of date the old one was.

It's still hardly a game machine or anything close to it and a $699 PC with a halfway decent graphics card would blow it out of the water in that regard. And yes Apple SHOULD be thinking about a lower-end "gaming" Mac given Steam, etc. and the new popularity of games on the iPhone/iOS platform there is no better time to release one.

 

[ouimetnick]

Agree whole-heartedly. The old Mac Mini's was already a great small size. All they should've done is revamped the styling to make it look fresh, while keeping it the same size, and upgrading the internal hardware, all while keeping it the same price.

There's absolutely NO point in making an already-tiny desktop machine even tinier.

There's absolutely NO point in a desktop machine having a strong-but-expensive unibody case.

KnightWRX doesn't agree. He/she says its the smallest and fastest desktop computer. Does any one really care about its size? Its a desktop computer, so it doesn't need to be compact and small. I my self would like it bigger, so you can use 3.5" HDD and socketed CPUs. Some apple loyalists think the unibody case is cool too, and I agree with them, but its stupid for a desktop computer, and some disagree with me on that. The computer is sitting in one FRICKEN location, heck it doesn't need a small expensive case. The unibody part will never be useful. They didn't vene need a design change. Just a spec bump would have been fine.
And if they were to change the design, don't make it smaller, make is easy to upgrade the HDD, RAM, and CPU.

 

[50548]

Wow that looks incredibly cool. How do they make it so thin?

Looks STUNNING and really well-specced for its price point...sometimes I have the impression that Apple's least hyped updates are THE best...anyone else with the same impression?

AND GO BRAZIL! 2 x 1 North Korea (who played really well)

 

[dave61]

Actually they have already started to roll out the 1000MB/s internet connections. Everyone will have minimum 100MB/s next year.

So kiss your precious Blu-rays goodbye! Everything´s gonna change really soon. So better start selling those Blu-ray collections now when they are still worth something. Next year it will be a totally different story.

Which planet do you live on?

 

[Anuba]

Thats why there market share is so small in sweden.

I don't think their market share over here is that bad. The main problem wasn't the prices (until today) but the fact that they are very poorly represented. No Apple Stores, dodgy and slow support, little to no advertising. The iPhone/iPod halo effect is their only asset. Meanwhile their PC competitors are every bit as well represented here as they are in the US. TV ads, excellent on-site support, wide availability, the whole package... so of course they steamroll Apple Sweden.

 

[dave61]

Again the ridiculous SD slot instead of ExpressCard which is what is really needed.

I need an SD slot not a ridicuous ExpressCard.

 

[BobHail]

Which planet do you live on?

It´s going to happen, trust me.

 

[Bytor65]

At first it was an entry level Mac, it was meant to be easy to use and the most inexpensive Mac you could get, not the most expandable.

Using regular components, it could be both less expensive and more expandable. It might be the most inexpensive mac you can get, but it isn't inexpensive. For a while it looked like Apple wasn't going to be all about the "Apple Tax", but with price/performance here, the pendulum is swinging in that direction again.

I always hoped this would evolve in a Living Room PC with Remote (used to have one?), Blu Ray, and full size HD.

But now, it is essentially $700 for a laptop with no keyboard, mouse, screen or battery.

 

[BobHail]

KnightWRX doesn't agree. He/she says its the smallest and fastest desktop computer. Does any one really care about its size? Its a desktop computer, so it doesn't need to be compact and small. I my self would like it bigger, so you can use 3.5" HDD and socketed CPUs. Some apple loyalists think the unibody case is cool too, and I agree with them, but its stupid for a desktop computer, and some disagree with me on that. The computer is sitting in one FRICKEN location, heck it doesn't need a small expensive case. The unibody part will never be useful. They didn't vene need a design change. Just a spec bump would have been fine.
And if they were to change the design, don't make it smaller, make is easy to upgrade the HDD, RAM, and CPU.

Yes, I agree.

You know they made iPad in between the iPhone and MacBook. Now they need to release a new desktop Mac between the Mac Mini and Mac Pro. Huge gap there.

 

[jmor]

Very nice looking machine for sure, but not loving the price bump or the lack or blu-ray. I have been wanting an HTPC mac mini though if I wait until I can find a used/refurb ...